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I hear that many of you are uninterested in doing the work required here. Allow me to offer a couple arguments in favor of taking accessibility seriously: 1. D

I hear that many of you are uninterested in doing the work required here. Allow me to offer a couple arguments in favor of taking accessibility seriously: 1. Disability is a spectrum, not a condition, and a temporal, not a terminal state. Ever get your eyes dilated? Ever break your foot? Ever try using most common devices with a baby in your hands? Ever needed to watch a video in a loud room, or a place in which you cannot use headphones? Ever try using a laptop outside on a sunny day? Ever try getting old? 2. 26% of all adults in the US have some form of disability. 10% of these are sensory (hearing/sight). Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population? 3. We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public, not just a subset of it - we're making an average of 2-5x the median income, presumably based on our professionalism, knowledge of our craft, and ability to do hard things. 4. It's the right thing to do, both morally and practically. It allows every person to participate in society, allows us to leverage the full skills and abilities of every available human, and doesn't give us an "out" to start excluding people because we're too lazy to consider their needs. 5. If none of that sways you: some day you too will need this, if for no other reason than you've gotten old. It'll be nice to live in a world in which the people we are today are willing to take care of the people we'll be some day.

NelsonMinar 5y ago
Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels. In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image. The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.
- roughly 5y ago
  The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...
- jameshart 5y ago
  One of the weird parts I find about accessibility is that it tends to be considered as ‘something the developers do’. That we can solve accessibility just through technical means, and generally just by playing around with the user interface. In organization after organization I see accessibility as something the tech org has to champion to get time to deliver on, so it gets seen as an ‘extra cost’ of developing a feature. But the fact is that some features, as requested, are really hard to deliver in an accessible way - but if you thought about what you wanted to deliver from an accessible angle in the first place you might find there’s a way to solve the problem that is intrinsically more accessible. In general not enough attention is paid to just flat out whether an entire business process is accessible. Or perhaps more - how you can adjust your business, your offering, or your process in order to make it possible for more people to access it, or to be employed by you in delivering it. If you treat accessibility as a box checking exercise done by web and app devs you can end up worrying about making the driver portal of your ride sharing app work for a blind user, rather than thinking about what features are needed to make it possible for a person in a wheelchair to hire a rideshare that can accommodate them. Accessibility doesn’t begin and end at screenreader support and text contrast levels. But if you leave it up to developers to do then that may be all you’re going to be able to get.
  - roughly 5y ago
    Agree with this. As much shade as I tend to throw at engineers for not considering the consequences of our actions, finance, sales, and marketing are absolutely different beasts here, and you're right that it often does wind up being engineering that's trying to push for these viewpoints.
mwint 5y ago
All of this is right, except for this part: > We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public “Asked” is wrong here. I can “ask” someone to do something. The government can “force” someone to do something, ultimately at gunpoint. That’s what I don’t like about this.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I think the parent comment makes a fair point. No matter how small the issue, the government's rules are ultimately backed by the threat of deadly violence [0]. I think the rhetorical difference between "ask" and "force" is ripe for abuse in discussions regarding contentious government roles. [0] If this seems implausible, consider this thought experiment (U.S.-based). A police officer gives you a ticket jaywalking. If you don't pay it, you're at risk of being the target of an arrest warrant. If the police find you, they will attempt to put you in cuffs. It goes downhill from there. For jaywalking. I'm not arguing for or against things working this way, but I do think it's reality.
  - chociej 5y ago
    In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking
    - CoastalCoder 5y ago
      > In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking I agree. But you are being arrested for the consequences of fully refusing to accept the jaywalking rule.
      - chociej 5y ago
        No, I don't think you are. You're being arrested for not paying the fine. Each was an independent choice on your part.
  - roughly 5y ago
    All social compacts are ultimately backed with force. If you and a dozen people fucked off to SeaLand and lived in an anarchic commune, your agreements with one another would _still_ ultimately be backed by force, in the same way that everything here is: Your SeaLand commune agrees on some principles for behavior - say, no pushing other people; someone in the group decides to push other people; the group intervenes, attempts to talk the person out of pushing other people; the Pusher refuses to see reason; the group either resorts to force or abandons the commune to a pushocracy. If you want to argue the government is illegitimate, then go ahead, but to just point vaguely to "socially defined rules are backed by force" isn't really _saying_ anything without that.
hackernewds 5y ago
> 26% have some form of disability Find that hard to believe purely on common experience + if not, likely not "disabled" in the sense of being affected to a degree of not being able to use a standard website. in the same vein, counterargument here is a lot of disabled people _can_ indeed use a standard website.
5560675260 5y ago
> Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population? Irregardless of what kind of of business I'm running, I'm targeting only tiny sliver of population. I'm easily ignoring 90%, sometimes 99.9% of population, as long as it allows me to make a better product for the remaining few.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

Worth noting that disability accommodations often benefit everyone, not just disabled people. A classic example is wheelchair accessibility. Those ramps and elevators are also useful to parents pushing a stroller, to someone walking a bicycle, or to someone towing a heavy load on wheels. In the Web context, accessible websites also work better for search indexing, and for semantic processing, and for manipulating with Javascript (ie: addons). Text annotations for images are a huge help to all sorts of people and software, not just folks who can't see the image. The main reason to support accessibility work is that it is the right thing to do for disabled people. But if that doesn't motivate you, there are selfish reasons for people without disabilities too.

roughly 5y ago
The baby stroller's a classic - the number of people I know who've suddenly gained an appreciation for the ADA after having kids...
jameshart 5y ago
One of the weird parts I find about accessibility is that it tends to be considered as ‘something the developers do’. That we can solve accessibility just through technical means, and generally just by playing around with the user interface. In organization after organization I see accessibility as something the tech org has to champion to get time to deliver on, so it gets seen as an ‘extra cost’ of developing a feature. But the fact is that some features, as requested, are really hard to deliver in an accessible way - but if you thought about what you wanted to deliver from an accessible angle in the first place you might find there’s a way to solve the problem that is intrinsically more accessible. In general not enough attention is paid to just flat out whether an entire business process is accessible. Or perhaps more - how you can adjust your business, your offering, or your process in order to make it possible for more people to access it, or to be employed by you in delivering it. If you treat accessibility as a box checking exercise done by web and app devs you can end up worrying about making the driver portal of your ride sharing app work for a blind user, rather than thinking about what features are needed to make it possible for a person in a wheelchair to hire a rideshare that can accommodate them. Accessibility doesn’t begin and end at screenreader support and text contrast levels. But if you leave it up to developers to do then that may be all you’re going to be able to get.
- roughly 5y ago
  Agree with this. As much shade as I tend to throw at engineers for not considering the consequences of our actions, finance, sales, and marketing are absolutely different beasts here, and you're right that it often does wind up being engineering that's trying to push for these viewpoints.

mwint 5y ago

All of this is right, except for this part: > We are well-paid professionals being asked to make our tools usable by the entire public “Asked” is wrong here. I can “ask” someone to do something. The government can “force” someone to do something, ultimately at gunpoint. That’s what I don’t like about this.

CoastalCoder 5y ago
I think the parent comment makes a fair point. No matter how small the issue, the government's rules are ultimately backed by the threat of deadly violence [0]. I think the rhetorical difference between "ask" and "force" is ripe for abuse in discussions regarding contentious government roles. [0] If this seems implausible, consider this thought experiment (U.S.-based). A police officer gives you a ticket jaywalking. If you don't pay it, you're at risk of being the target of an arrest warrant. If the police find you, they will attempt to put you in cuffs. It goes downhill from there. For jaywalking. I'm not arguing for or against things working this way, but I do think it's reality.
- chociej 5y ago
  In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    > In that scenario, you are not being arrested for jaywalking I agree. But you are being arrested for the consequences of fully refusing to accept the jaywalking rule.
    - chociej 5y ago
      No, I don't think you are. You're being arrested for not paying the fine. Each was an independent choice on your part.
- roughly 5y ago
  All social compacts are ultimately backed with force. If you and a dozen people fucked off to SeaLand and lived in an anarchic commune, your agreements with one another would _still_ ultimately be backed by force, in the same way that everything here is: Your SeaLand commune agrees on some principles for behavior - say, no pushing other people; someone in the group decides to push other people; the group intervenes, attempts to talk the person out of pushing other people; the Pusher refuses to see reason; the group either resorts to force or abandons the commune to a pushocracy. If you want to argue the government is illegitimate, then go ahead, but to just point vaguely to "socially defined rules are backed by force" isn't really _saying_ anything without that.

hackernewds 5y ago

> 26% have some form of disability Find that hard to believe purely on common experience + if not, likely not "disabled" in the sense of being affected to a degree of not being able to use a standard website. in the same vein, counterargument here is a lot of disabled people _can_ indeed use a standard website.

5560675260 5y ago

> Are you really telling me you're just ignoring 26% of the population? Irregardless of what kind of of business I'm running, I'm targeting only tiny sliver of population. I'm easily ignoring 90%, sometimes 99.9% of population, as long as it allows me to make a better product for the remaining few.